The Star Wars Cast Should Be Better

The casting news for J.J. Abrams’s new Star Wars film gives us a lot to be excited about. Interesting actors like Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, and John Boyega have been tapped to star along our old favorites, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill. This hopefully tells us that Abrams is trying to make something smart and idiosyncratic, without cheaply relying on big-name movie stars to fill in gaps in quality. But looking at the new list, it’s hard not to notice something dismaying: Only one woman, newcomer Daisy Ridley, is in the new lineup. By our count, that’s eleven principals who are men and only two who are women. And there are only two non-white people, both men, on the list. Couldn’t they have done better?

Or, I guess, shouldn’t they have done better? Star Wars has never been a bastion of diversity. Lando and Leia were the only non-white and non-male main characters (among the humans, anyway) in the original franchise; George Lucas’s dreadful prequels at least made some attempts at racial diversity, with Samuel L. Jackson and Jimmy Smits playing large roles, though it mostly forgot about women. (And some critics took issue with ethnically charged alien characters, but that’s a different story.) So here was Abrams’s chance to issue something of a corrective, to open up this universe to more people.

With something like Star Wars, a space opera fantasy that exists in a galaxy that needn’t suffer from our particular social ills, a director is presented with a fairly easy opportunity to fill out a cast, and a story, with all kinds of people. Abrams and company had a lot of time to think about improving on what came before, and yet they just repeated two old mistakes. That seems like a waste of a perfect chance to operate more inclusively, to invite in difference.

While the original films may suggest it by example, there’s nothing in the world of Star Wars that explicitly says that women don’t have as much agency as men, or that there isn’t a vast array of skin colors within the humanoid population zigzagging across space. So why so stringently follow the terrible rules of our own culture, where minorities and women are systematically marginalized in favor of white male hero after white male hero? Star Wars is pure fantasy, and yet a lot of this initial casting seems to follow our dullest and most frustrating terrestrial tendencies.

The extra troubling thing about this disappointingly one-note cast is that it doesn’t seem to have dawned on anyone involved that people might cry foul. What’s worse, though expected, is that the crying foul has already spurred a brigade of Internet defenders into action, minimizing any concerns about the homogeneity of the cast by saying that concerns about representation are overblown. So, yet again, those who benefit from the status quo (let’s be honest, it’s largely white men arguing that there isn’t a problem) are given the advantage of being able to swat away anyone who objects as joyless complainers (or worse), all the while content, consciously or not, in the knowledge that they’ll get to see the movie they want anyway.

This isn’t a new story, obviously, and that it happened with Star Wars really shouldn’t be any more surprising than that it happened with myriad other movies. But something about this particular franchise, the way that it has been so culturally permeating, here and around the world—and the fact that J.J. Abrams has previously, with Alias and Lost and the inherited diversity of the original Star Trek, told stories about lots of different kinds of people—made me hope that some old wrongs would be righted, or new strides made. But, it would appear not. Unless there are more major roles to be cast, J.J. Abrams and everyone else involved with Episode VII didn’t see fit to include more than two significant female characters, nor did they seem all that concerned with any other kind of diversity. And that’s a shame.